


Carry On, Phenomenon

by morbidbookworm



Series: Carry On, Phenomenon [1]
Category: Carry On - Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell, Simon Snow series - Gemma T. Leslie
Genre: Agatha Ebb and the Mage are only mentioned, Baz and therapy just don't mix, Baz is a suicidal pyro who can't cook, Baz is in Simon's head even when he isn't in the room, Baz likes having his picture taken, Baz should just start paying rent, Butter, EMDR-mention, Flying, Hypnotherapy-mention, I love them so much, Kinda, LOVE HIM, Lists, M/M, Might add more tags later, No One Is Okay, Penny has so many theories about Simon's magic, Penny is living with a couple of idiots, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Simon's therapist, Simon's therapist knows his weakness, Simon's wings and tail, Somatic Experiencing-mention, and Simon likes taking pictures of him, but that's okay, college people, it can be so complicated for some people, just a little at the end, no real plot, not much dialogue, part of a short series, sad Nicodemus, sexuality debate, so many classes, such a villain, the tower room is my favorite character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-14
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-05-14 00:32:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 18,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5722894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morbidbookworm/pseuds/morbidbookworm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now that he wasn’t at Watford, Simon had to make some new lists. Some he actually wrote down on their brand-new whiteboard, or stuck on the fridge so Penny and Baz could see it and add their own.<br/>But some were private. Just for him in his head.<br/>Things to not think about:<br/>No. 1 – The Mage.<br/>No. 2 – Ebb.<br/>No. 3 – His magic. Gone.<br/>No. 4 – The Humdrum.<br/>No. 5 – Watford. (That one wasn’t easy.)<br/>No. 6 – Agatha. (That one was surprisingly easy.)<br/>No. 7 – Gay?<br/>No. 8 – His parents. (Not anymore.)<br/>No. 9 – What to wear. (Penny and Baz wanted a shopping intervention. Like hell.)<br/>No. 10 – What the fuck he’s going to do now . . .<br/>Sometimes he just wanted to scrawl EVERYTHING over this entire list. He’s good at not thinking. At least that’s something he can do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. how you remind me

**Author's Note:**

> This first chapter is just a preface, detailing some stuff that happened after the Mage died to the end of the book, just to remind people where we are. The other chapters are new material. It's my first time posting on AO3, but don't worry, I'll get better at this.

After they ate all the Hobnobs, Penelope fell asleep on Baz’s bed. He frowned at her, and tried to go over to his bed at the same time Simon instinctively moved towards his own, almost separating them. They stopped and looked at each other. Simon immediately stepped closer, tightening his hold on Baz’s arm and pushing his face into his shoulder.

Baz raised his wand. **_“Two peas in a pod.”_**

Their beds, Baz’s still with a slumbering Penelope on top of the sheets, slid silently from their places until they settled next to each other. All three of them were covered with blood, but they were so tired. Simon collapsed on his stomach next to Penelope, his wings dragging awkwardly to the side. Baz slid in next to him on his back, until they were tangled together with hands clutching shirts, Simon’s tail wrapped unconsciously around Baz’s leg, and Baz’s nose and bloody mouth pressed against Simon’s curls. The whole room smelled like smoke until the scent got blown out the open window, and they slept.

 .

When Penny woke up, she was confused as to how she, Simon and Baz had ended up in the boys’ beds pushed together in their room, and then as to Simon’s wings flopping around and hitting her in the face, and the blood covering both boys, and why they were curled up closer than sworn enemies had any right to be.

Penny didn’t suddenly remember what had happened - she just felt all the feelings and knowing welling up inside her. She was a little torn between the parts of her that wanted to take action and fix everything, make sure her three people were okay and then hide them away from Humdrums and vampires and anything else that might hurt them, going back to sleep, and the surprisingly big part of her that wanted very much to throw a pillow at the boys.

Then Penelope spotted her mother slumped in Simon’s desk chair, and promptly burst into tears.

.

When Baz woke up he looked like he wanted take a protective stance over the sound asleep Simon and hiss at the Bunces to get the fuck out of their room before he lit them on fire.

Instead he sneered at their incredulous expressions and took a shower. When he got out the blood was off his face, his hair was slicked back like a gangster’s and the room smelled like cedar and bergamot.

Mitali had left, and Penny was crouched over Simon, wondering if she should try a spell or something. For what, she wasn’t sure.

Baz promptly shoved her out of the way and reclaimed his place by Simon’s side, slinging an arm around his shoulders and leaning against the headboard. He took out his phone and called his parents. They sounded upset. Well, his aunt sounded upset.

.

When Simon woke up he didn’t say anything; just sat up so he was shoulder to shoulder with Baz and clung tightly to his arm. He drank all the tea Penny put in front of him and took a shower only after she reminded him and only after a silent conversation with Baz.

Penny bored her eyes into Baz’s forehead as the sound of running water started up in the bathroom. He ignored her for several minutes and only seemed to notice her staring when he looked up from his phone and accidently caught her eye. He raised an eyebrow at her and stuck his out his tongue.

When Simon got back out, he stole back Baz’s arm, drank more tea and still didn’t say anything.

Baz summoned all the mint flavored Aero Bars in the room and the three of them finished them off in no time flat.

.

.

The days before and during the trial passed in a daze. The winter break was extended so most of it could be properly sorted out before students returned to the school.

No one mentioned Nicodemus. Baz kind of wanted to admit he had helped and also kind of didn’t. But the trouble everyone would be in for consorting with a banished vampire wasn’t worth the small acknowledgement, and it would bring up all sorts of questions he didn’t want to answer.

He had been the one to tell Nicodemus Ebb was dead, the day after it happened. He found him at his and Ebb’s mum’s house with the rest of his family, all of whom had broken the rules and let him in while they waiting for news about their aunty. He didn’t even step inside, just told the lady at the door who looked like a younger, cleaner version of Ebb to tell Nicodemus that by the time they got there she was already dead.

He left before she could start crying. He had to get back to Simon.

.

Simon was staying with the Bunce’s. For a few days Baz stayed with him, much to the Mrs. Professor Bunce’s chagrin. She didn’t like him very much. She knew he was a vampire. Penny and Simon had tried to tell her years ago, but like Penny she hadn’t really believed it until she saw proof with her own eyes. She wasn’t stupid, she saw the blood and the birds and his fangs and while she could prove very little without a confession or proof he drank blood, it was proof enough for her. Penny talked to her mum, and her dad put in his opinion, and they still found Mitali glaring down Basilton like he was the enemy.

Baz glared at her stonily from where he was lounging on Penny’s bed with his head in Simon’s lap. Before he could insult, threaten, or possibly offer Mitali a large sum of money to keep quiet, someone else spoke up.

“Please don’t,” Simon said, and it was the first thing he had said since waking up in the tower room. His voice was cracked and pitchy and hoarse, but he clutched Baz’s hand tightly. “Please don’t tell. They’ll take him away. They’ll kill him.”

Mitali crumbled.

.

The three of them slept in Penny’s room and hardly spoke to each other, although Simon didn’t let go of Baz’s hand, and Baz made no move to remove it himself. Penny kept staring at them, at their hands, at Simon’s head on Baz’s shoulder and Baz’s arm around him, until she got bored and started reading something. They all slept and ate a lot.

.

They realized Simon’s magic was gone and that his wings and tail were there to stay.

.

And then Baz had to go home.

Of course he did, his family had been the latest victims of the Humdrum and they were calling for someone’s head. The Families were on the brink of starting a war, although they did not yet know there was no one left to war against.

He didn’t want to leave Simon. Penny left them alone for a little bit, the day before he had to leave, and they spent most of it curled up in her bed, hands tangled together, trading mobile numbers, and Baz promised that no, he wasn’t going to be able to pretend this never happened, _honestly Simon, I already know you’re barmy, there’s no need to mess with you and I’ll miss you too anyway, idiot._

_._

Penny came back, took one look at them, and threw a pillow at their heads.

“What the hell you two!? A lifetime of obsessive hatred and then this? What do you call the last seven and a half years of fighting, stalking, abuse, and attempted murder!?”

Baz shrugged, very Simon-like, and nudged the top of Simon’s head with his chin. “Foreplay?”

Simon snorted a laugh into Baz’s jumper.

Baz grinned like he lit the stars and hung the moon.

Penelope threw up her hands. “I give up. It’s not like I’ve ever understood your relationship anyways. Move over, Pitch.”

She clambered onto the bed and threw her legs over Simon’s lap.

“I’m watching you,” she said.

“Of course you are,” said Baz. “I’m criminally good looking.”

“Or possibly just criminal.”

Simon laughed again, like he wanted to, but also it like it hurt. Baz squeezed his hand and nosed his hair. His eyes were burning with a mad glint and Simon had that chin-jutted expression that meant he wasn’t letting something go, that meant the harder someone pushed him about it the tighter he’d hold on.

.

Penny supposed she could scrape together a few scraps of trust for Tyrannous Basilton Grimm-Pitch. Or maybe trusting Simon was the same as trusting Baz, like the way you couldn’t complain about one without the other coming up.

Maybe she didn’t have to trust him at all. That could be Simon’s job. Baz could be Simon’s problem, like he always was.

She had been wrong about so many things.

.

Simon only once thought to ask about Agatha. Penny said she was fine. Baz didn’t ask at all.

.

.

Baz went home and got tell his aunt the Mage was dead. He also got tell her Simon was off limits. With her enemy finally slain and her new job, she was content with that. For some reason it was harder to tell his parents the same thing, but for Simon he probably would have disowned himself. Telling them was easier by far.

He got to address the Families.

In years to come, there would be no small number of people who would ask exactly what happened after he went home. What could he have said that stopped a war?

It _was_ hard to convince a society of narrow minded old people to try and work with the changes and take back what they deserved _subtly,_ instead of storming the nonexistent bastille, especially when you have to leave out the part about dating the technical heir to the previous revolution that was now being revolutionized against.

But he managed. It was at a party, after all. He always felt more in control in a suit.

.

“Basilton. Were you the one who killed the Mage?”

It was Lady Ruth Salisbury, an elderly woman who came from a family much like the Petty’s - powerful, but not prominent or involved in politics. She had stopped visiting the club after a scandal with her daughter, and her husband had died not long after. She was a wide, sturdy woman, with masses of thinning white and grey hair pinned up under an atrociously feathery hat, and a world’s map of wrinkles around her broad smiling mouth and tired blue eyes.

Baz smiled with perfect charm. “I am about to travel to London to attend the trials. I’m sure the Coven will get to the bottom of what happened. Perhaps next year the elections will see your name rejoining the ranks. It goes without saying that your family would be a most welcome help in the magickal government.”

“Oh, dear boy,” the lady sighed. “Have some cake.”

He spent a strangely enjoyable few minutes being stuffed with cake and sandwiches, and being prodded with uncomfortably blunt questions, by a lady who apparently did not believe in being under two hundred pounds, before he could sneak off and call Simon.

.

The trials themselves did take place in London, with the Coven after the new elections. Simon, Baz and Penelope shared a hotel room during the face trials, waiting for each other to finish.

They had carefully discussed what they would say, and decided on the truth, or rather bits of it.

No one mentioned that Baz had wanted to be the one to kill the Mage, although he agreed to tell them about his mother’s visiting, and a vague description of their first meeting with Nicodemus, making it seem like he had told them who had sent the vampires to Watford from the start and then they had gone to the Mage to corroborate the story.

No one mentioned Baz and Simon were together, although that was not on purpose. They just didn’t point it out and didn’t bother to hide that they were holding hands anytime they weren’t separated.

(Baz also didn’t want to mention he was kidnapped by numpties, until Penny pointed out that it would only get the Mage in more trouble, and anyway the trial records would be sealed so no one would know he had been bushwhacked by a couple of _numpties_.)

.

Simon and Penelope came from each questioning with pale faces and Simon didn’t speak for the rest of the day after he had to recount how the Mage died. Baz brought along his violin and played every song he knew, from Hot Cross Buns to Mozart, with Simon holding his feet in his lap.

The Coven was getting quite sick of questioning Baz, so he had lots of free time.

.

Then it was over, but it didn’t feel over. Baz was back to school while Simon stayed with Penny. Time slipped and slid and sped along despairing and discordantly, and then they were dancing, and then they were talking more than they had in a while, and then they were moving in.

(Well, Simon was moving in.)

(Because Baz and Penny did not help.)

(At all.)

.

.

Now that he wasn’t at Watford, Simon had to make some new lists. Some he actually wrote down on their brand-new whiteboard, or stuck on the fridge so Penny and Baz could see it and add their own.

But some were private. Just for him in his head.

** Things to not think about: **

**No. 1 – The Mage.**

**No. 2 – Ebb.**

**No. 3 – His magic. Gone.**

**No. 4 – The Humdrum.**

**No. 5 – Watford.** (That one wasn’t easy.)

 **No. 6 – Agatha.** (That one was surprisingly easy.)

**No. 7 – Gay?**

**No. 8 – His parents.** (Not anymore.)

 **No. 9 – What to wear.** (Penny and Baz wanted a shopping intervention. Like hell.)

**No. 10 – What the fuck he’s going to do now . . .**

Sometimes he just wants to scrawl EVERYTHING over this entire list. He’s good at not thinking. At least that’s something he can do.


	2. Kiss my eyes and lay me to sleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nightmares and sleepovers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not that anyone noticed, but I have changed the name of the series this belongs to be the same as the title of this story. I may change the title of this story at some point, and leave Carry On, Phenomenon as just the series title. Carry On, Phenomenon is a Kishi Bashi song (seriously, I looked him up as soon as Rainbow Rowell mentioned Baz playing his music) and it is lovely. I believe the song Baz was playing was In Fantasia as it is the only one of his songs that could be described as "unnecessarily morose."
> 
> For the parenthesized notes on the lists, normal is Simon, italicized is Penny, underlined is Baz. Unfortunately, you can't underline or italicize in these notes.

Simon woke up burning, sure he was about to go off. Only when the imaginary scent of smoke had faded and cold air hit his sweaty body, making him shiver in his mismatched striped grey pajama set, did he start to breathe again. His tail lashed nervously and his wings stretched out behind him with an almost audible creak. They had gotten crushed while he was tossing and turning.

Instinctively he looked across the room, fully expecting to see Baz in his own bed with a furrowed brow and his cheeks full of teeth as he was caught in the grip of his own nightmare. Unable to find him in the gloom, Simon began to panic again. The mixed fear of Baz doing something unknown and something unknown doing something to Baz spun around his head, until he was on his feet, prepared to stumble around the catacombs until he was sure of where Baz was.

It took a few seconds for him to realize he didn’t even know where _he_ was, and then his thoughts came around full circle and he sat back down on the edge of his bed with a bounce. He was in the apartment he shared with Penny, and Baz was at his aunt’s. It was three forty two in the morning; everyone would be asleep.

.

Sleeping next to Baz for so long had turned out to be a hard habit to break.

.

Simon stood up again and padded out of his room silently, grabbing his new phone from the bedside table and dialing Baz’s mobile number. He sat on the kitchen counter and dipped a stick of butter in the brown sugar bowl while he waited for the kettle to boil and Baz to pick up.

“Simon. What.” Baz’s voice sounded and thick, like his fangs were out.

“Sorry. Were you hunting?”

“Don’t be sorry. Nightmare. Why, is something wrong? Is it back?” He meant the Humdrum.

“No. Just nightmares too, I guess.”

The kettle hissed and Simon took it off the stove before the noise disturbed Penny. He stuck the crunchy sweet butter in his mouth for safe keeping while he poured the tea and let it seep. “I had a seriously scary thought.”

“Bunce-on-test-nights scary or a-dragon-is-about-to-eat-me-help scary?”

“A little of both.” He sipped the tea; it was too hot and the butter and sugar melted from the corners of his mouth. “It isn’t summer.”

“ . . . I am aware, Snow.”

“No, I mean . . .” Simon very much wanted to bang into something, but he didn’t want to wake Penny. He settled for lightly kicking his heels against the counter. “I mean we aren’t going to be sleeping in our room together in three months.”

There was a moment of silence, and then a thump from the other end of the phone. Now Baz was the one banging into things.

“Fuck. I’m coming over.”

“What? No, Baz-“

“I can be there in twenty minutes, Snow.”

“But-“

“Too late.” _*Click*_

.

He was there in fifteen.

.

“I miss our room,” Simon confessed, once Baz had climbed through the window, (“You have a key.” “Not as much fun.”) and they had comfortably situated themselves in Simon’s bed. (“You’re lying on my wing.” “Get your elbow out of my stomach.”)

“So many wasted years,” Baz agreed. “To think we spent half the nights there sitting awake glaring at each other because we didn’t trust each other not to try anything while our backs were turned. Not that I’d have minded . . .”

Simon poked him in the side. “Pervert. Although, it was the Crucible that stuck us together in a room separate from everyone else, where we had no choice but to spend most nights together. With a shower.

“Mmm. For an emblem of God, it did set us up very smoothly.”

.

Of course, it had taken nearly eight years. But there was only a small twinge of regret when Simon thought about that. It would have been nice to be able to sleep next to each other in peace, or to have been able to work together directly, or to have gotten over the whole Agatha thing sooner. Or to have had moments alone like this and enjoyed them.

But it had been _fun_. Annoying and scary and rage inducing, but fun. At least, when they were thumping each other or yelling or watching because they wanted to, not because other people wanted them to.

.

“It was weird without you,” Baz murmured. “I spent most nights on the grounds. The top of the White Chapel is gone, just like the nursery. I checked.”

He nosed Simon’s hair and smoothed a few curls to the side. “Speaking of our room and places that respond to blood magic, Miss Possibelf called recently. She said the tower room closed itself off after graduation day. It won’t open for anyone, even the cleaners. The teachers have tried everything, but they can’t get in.”

Simon buried his face in Baz’s dark blue silk sleep jumper. “Oops.”

“ _Snow_.”

“Shut up! You know I was never good at any of the opening spells. Blood was quicker and easier and didn’t involve blowing the door off its hinges.”

“That poor door. It must miss you banging into it all the time.”

Simon thought about all the blood, sweat, tears, and handkerchiefs, that had gone into putting their room on his list.

“We can always go back someday.”

.

.

The next morning found them tangled together among the sheets with a disapproving Penny looming in the doorway.

“I will charge you rent, Basilton,” she said, hands on her wide hips and her hair a dark frizzy mass around her scowling face.

“It’s not your bed he’s sleeping in,” Simon pointed out around a yawn.

At some point Baz’s shirt had come off, and he grinned lazily at Penelope, lounging bare-chested on the bed, with his head hanging off the edge. Simon’s tail was wrapped possessively around his leg.

“Snow doesn’t mind. And I pay my way just fine.”

Penelope shook her head and went to spell up some breakfast, ignoring the thump and “OW, bloody fuck, Snow!” of Baz getting pushed off the bed and the ensuing chaos that followed.

.

.

.

Stuck to the fridge with a Keep Calm and Carry On magnet:

**Things that help:**

**No. 1 – Food.**

**No. 2 – Baz.** (Technically this should be first, but I’m not willing to inflate your ego any more than is necessary.)

**No. 3 – Lists.**

**No. 4 – Penny.** (Where the lists fail, Penny always prevails.)

**No. 5 – Hourly blood supplements.** (This one is Baz’s.)

**No. 6 – The whiteboard.** (Penny and Baz’s.)

**No. 7 – Weekly sleepovers with Baz.** _(However hard it is to come by, a good night’s sleep does wonders the next day. Don’t stay up too late, boys.)_

**No. 8 – Keeping busy.**

**No. 9 – Therapy.** (It _helps_ , Baz, even if it isn’t a miracle worker.)

**No. 10 – Banging into things.** (That is not a coping mechanism, Snow.)

There should be more to this list. But life is hard, and they are tired. Simon hopes it will get longer with time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is also posted on fanfiction.net, under my same name. I have other fics there as well, and may at some point post them here too. The story there has a picture, and I would like to share it with you, but I can't post it since is is in my Microsoft Picture Manager and not on an internet page.


	3. not crazy, just a little unwell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Therapy, PTSD treatments, and snide head comments courtesy of one imaginary Tyrannus Basilton Grimm-Pitch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is super techy - although I actually cut it down a lot. I personally am more of a Baz when it comes to therapy. It really doesn't work for me, the talking kind, the specialty therapies mentioned here, none of it helps. I actually quite loath it. I have my own ways of making myself feel good (pfft not like that you pervs) so I like it when people respect that it if someone doesn't want it, it's very possible it wouldn't do any good.  
> That being said, I know it does work for a lot of people, so I'm doing my best to represent that. There are both Simon's and Baz's in the world, people, and we must find a way to work together. Or send Chimera's after each other, because that's definitely the best flirting tactic anyone has ever come up with.
> 
> What do you guys think about the therapist? Does she need a name? I kind of tried to giver her a personality by not giving her a personality. Bleh. Every other chapter is going to be therapy related, not all about PTSD, which wasn't my intention. The therapy chapter just got so long and had so many subjects that I had to split it up. Don't worry, none of the rest of them will be this techy.
> 
> Question: Would you guys like it if I replied to comments? It usually annoys me if other people do it, but I figure if it would make you guys comment more, than sure, I'll ask.

Simon never saw what his therapist looked like below her shoulders. They were thin, those shoulders, perpetually hunched under thin pastel wraps. She was a pasty, beige smudge of a woman, and he could never remember her name.

.

What Simon’s therapist talked the most about was PTSD. Simon had PTSD, according to her. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She said it happened when negative memories got trapped inside a physical body and damaged it; causing the body to stay in that same state of red alert that it was in during the trauma.

( _With a fancy acronym and everything,_ Baz’s voice sneered in his head. That happened a lot, most likely because the real Baz always high-tailed it out of the flat every time Simon started to set up Skype. )

Simon asked if Penny and Baz had PTSD too. His therapist said they might, but no one ever reacted the same, even if they had the same experiences, and she would need to meet with them for an official diagnoses. Simon thought there were better chances of the fairies wandering back out of the woods.

.

Penny had her own way of coping with things. She was writing, in her spare time outside of class. Writing down what had happened. Figuring out how it all fit together. Just notes for now, but she was adamant that she would eventually sit down and write down their whole story from start to finish.

Simon would help her with the parts she wasn’t sure about, but not right now. Maybe later, when it felt further away.

Penny was unreasonably thrilled with his diagnoses, most likely out of smug self-satisfaction that she had been the first to suggest it.

.

Simon had made several attempts to get Baz to sit in on his Skype sessions.

“You don’t even have to say anything,” Simon said. “Just sit here and do your homework or something.”

“Sure,” Baz said. “If I can smoke and interject my opinion when I see fit.”

The conversation didn’t always make it that far.

But maybe, Simon mused, Baz was not the kind of person who would find therapy very useful. He certainly wasn’t the kind of person who took comfort from confiding in other people. And he talked to Simon, which was all he really wanted.

So Simon let him be. For the most part.

.

But then Simon’s therapist told him about some psychotherapies that could be useful in dealing with PTSD.

_( Psycho-therapies. Always nice to have an official confirmation that you’re as mad as the rest of us.)_

“Negative memories are trapped at a physical level, and must be let go at a physical level, but the therapy also combines cognitive, behavioral and sensory-related treatments,” his therapist said, sounding as if she were quoting someone very important. “These help your body let go of those chemicals connected to the trauma. Additionally, a feeling of disconnectedness can result from trauma when the inability to fight or flee freezes the person’s response. These treatments can counteract this disconnection because they act on the nervous system.”

Somatic experiencing, EMDR and hypnotherapy were the three therapies she mentioned. They were all similar in the way that they helped retrain your body to calm down, instead of constantly being on red alert or freaking out when triggered by something harmless that made it think it was back in the traumatic experience.

“EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing,” his therapist said. She had a tiny pink bow mouth that moved fast but talked slow. She talked a lot, but never about herself. “It was actually discovered by accident – someone was walking through the forest and they kept moving their eyes back and forth across the path. When they got out of the trees, they felt better. Because the eyes are so connected to the brain, certain repeated eye movements can tell the brain to calm down. Listening to certain audio tones or other positive sensory stimulants that cross the centerline of your body and brain also work, because the goal is to think about the distressing emotion or event, while simultaneously experiencing this positive back and forth sensation that keeps you in the present and not reliving the memory.”

“Um. Okay. Great. What does that mean?” asked Simon.

“It means, we would sit here like this, and I would move my finger back and forth in front of you face and you would follow it with your eyes. Or, more likely, because we wouldn’t be in the same room, we would use an app where a colored dot bounced back and forth across the screen and you would hear sound tones through earbuds. Sometimes we would talk, mostly about different memories. And at the beginning and end of each session, you would rate how you felt. Usually there is a significant difference.

_(Sounds moronic. Perfect for you.)_

“And that helps?”

“It can. I’ll say this again, and I’m going to say it a lot – everyone is different. What helps one person, or a hundred people, might not work for another hundred. That’s why I’m giving you options. If these three things don’t feel good, we can find another three things to try.”

_(A one in a hundred chance of making a difference. Brilliant odds.)_

Simon rubbed his face. He wished Baz were there to say cruel and scathing thing out loud.

“What are the other things?”

.

In practice, his therapist said Somatic Experiencing would be very similar to EMDR. They would sit in the same place, and Simon would concentrate on a negative experience or emotion. Then he would say out loud how that was happening physically in his body when he thought about it. His arms might start to tense, or his chest might feel tight. She might say to tense his arms more, or to just keep feeling that for minute. And so on, going through the different physical reactions and tracking them though his body.

_(Every word out of this woman’s mouth is more unhinged than the last one. No wonder you like her so much.)_

_._

Hypnotherapy would be a little different, because as the name suggested, it was mild form of hypnosis. Not the cluck-like-a-chicken crack hypnosis, or the mind-controlling-take-over-the-world-with-a-zombie-army in crap telly. It was a state of calm, _conscious_ mind, usually brought about by visualizing certain things until the person was completely relaxed. Remembering a negative experience while in that state was not reliving it – and it taught the body and subconscious to not react as if it was experiencing the memory all over again.

_(Oh yes, please submit yourself to this stranger’s hypnotism where you will be completely defenseless – that’s not a completely_ daft _idea.)_

_._

“The point of all these practices is to become aware of what is happening to you, subconsciously and physically, when you relive the trauma trapped inside your body, and then how to calm yourself down, or remember it while remaining in a calm state of mind,” his therapist said.

Simon had nightmares, he walked around expecting to be attacked, and he avoided thinking about anything too connected to anything that had happened. Sometimes he still felt like he was going off. There were probably other ways this was affecting him, but it had been going on for so long. Since he was eleven. He wasn’t sure who he was when he wasn’t fighting a war. But the war was over; it was the battle inside himself that he had to worry about now.

.

_(It is over, love. I promise.)_

_(But it isn’t, is it? Not for me.)_

_._

“Tell you what,” his therapist said. Simon hadn’t spoken for a several minutes. “Why don’t I send you some links to good sources, so you and maybe your friends can look at these more and see what you think about trying any of them?”

Simon nodded.

“And also, I should mention some of these might not work to full effect over Skype. It has been done before to great effect, but everyone-“

“Is different,” Simon finished.

His therapist smiled blandly. “There are always ways to work around any problem, Simon. But my point is that one of the reasons some people don’t like to do it over a computer, is that I won’t really be with you. If something goes wrong, if you-“

“Freak out?”

“-if you get alarmed by what you’re experiencing, I won’t even be on the same continent, much less the same room to try and calm you down.”

_(How very ambitious of her, thinking she can keep you from going off.)_

_(Like you were ever much help. You enjoyed it.)_

_(You enjoyed me enjoying it.)_

“It might be a good idea to ask one of your friends to sit in with us or at least stay nearby during any future sessions we might have. Please think about it.”

_(Clearly no has told her that thinking about things is not in your repertoire.)_

“Sure,” Simon sighed. “I will.”

.

Simon still couldn’t talk about the Mage.

.

.

**Things my therapist said:**

**No. 1 – She does not fully understand my and Baz’s relationship, but it sounds like the most stable one I have.** (*maniacal* laughter* I win! In your face, Bunce!)

**No. 2 – I don’t have to label anything – sexuality, relationships, experiences – if I don’t want to/feel I shouldn’t.** (/am too moronic to.)

**No. 3 – Penny sounds like an amazing friend.** _(Damn right I am.)_

**No. 4 – Top 5 Things I Have to Sort Out: 1-Coping mechanisms for PTSD. 2-What I need to do day to day to function. 3-Finding healthy outlets like controlled combat. 4-Coping mechanisms for abandonment issues. 5- Good support system.** (Whatever all that means.)

**No. 5 – Having a thing about food is common for kids who didn’t get enough when they were growing up, and isn’t a problem as long as I exercise properly.** (So Baz can bite me.)

**No. 6 – My magic will probably never come back.**

**No. 7 – Because I was never put up for adoption, open or closed, and there is no paperwork concerning them, it is unlikely I will ever know who my parents were/are.**

**No. 8 – Thinking about the future can begin with small, manageable bites.**

**No. 9 – I don’t have to think about the Mage until I’m ready.**

**No. 10 – Not thinking about things only works for so long.**

**.**

He should probably tell his therapist about his lists.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Raise your hand if you think I know a ridiculous amount about PTSD treatments.
> 
> EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and Hypnotherapy are all real things and do work like this, although EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT so each therapist would specifically tailor the session to their patient's needs. If you guys would like, I could do a chapter with Simon doing a real EMDR session. Not the other ones, because I'm not sure he would actually do those, but EMDR is pretty simple and easy and effective. For other people anyway, some of whom I have talked to. Just not me. Or Baz. Or Penny? I don't know about her and therapy. I guess she's kind of in the middle?
> 
> Therapists in general don't know everything, and have to be trained in these therapies, so the chances of the therapist you go to talk to knowing about all these and suggesting them right off the bat is pretty low, but I also figured if your one of maybe five magickal psychiatrists in the world, you probably make it your business to know a lot about a lot of stuff.


	4. a kiss with a fist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fists and kisses. Fights, freak outs, make ups, and Baz's nose. Penny wants to punch them both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You hit me once  
> I hit you back  
> You gave a kick  
> I gave a slap  
> You smashed a plate over my head  
> Then I set fire to our bed
> 
> My black eye casts no shadow  
> Your red eye sees no blame  
> Your slaps don't stick  
> Your kicks don't hit  
> So we remain the same  
> Blood sticks  
> Sweat drips  
> Break the lock if it don't fit
> 
> A kick in the teeth is good for some  
> A kiss with a fist is better than none
> 
> I broke your jaw once before  
> I spilled your blood upon the floor  
> You broke my leg in a return  
> So let's sit back and watch the bed burn  
> Blood sticks  
> Sweat drips  
> Break the lock if it don't fit
> 
> You hit me once  
> I hit you back  
> You gave a kick  
> I gave a slap  
> You smashed a plate over my head  
> Then I set fire to our bed
> 
> For the full song, look up Kiss With a Fist by Florence and the Machine. 
> 
> I just think fighting is such an important part of their relationship - it's practically what it's built on, so I wanted to point all this out.
> 
> Also, I'd like to know how many of you would like to see an EMDR session, because otherwise I don't know how many chapters this is going to be. Feedback is important!

* * *

Fighting turned out to be another bad habit.

.

Simon and Baz went a whole two weeks in the new flat without snapping, and then one day Penny came home to find them screaming at each other from opposite ends of the living room. They were shouting so loud that none of their words were distinguishable, but when Simon made to leap for Baz’s throat, she reacted instinctively.

 ** _“ANATHEMA!”_** she screamed, and they both froze where they stood, half lunging at each other.

.

Anathema was not a spell. It did not have years of usage or countless magicians dissecting its nuances. But after eight years of being the only word standing between them, keeping them from actively tearing each other apart, it had its own power over the boys.

.

Simon and Baz looked around at Penny with similar looks of anger, panic and confusion. She swallowed.

“Sorry,” she offered. “I just was worried you would wake the neighbors.”

Simon’s leg (he was only standing on one) wobbled, and he fell over. Baz straightened with a sneer and, casting a single look of contempt over his shoulder, stormed out of the flat.

.

The thing was, Simon and Baz were _good_ at fighting. Really good. They had had a lot of practice. They knew all their buttons, and what would happen if they were pressed. They knew which insults were true and which ones were said only to inflict pain. They knew which ones to stay far away from. They knew the right and wrong fights to have, and the right and wrong situations to have them in. They knew the difference between bickering, arguing and fighting. They knew they should back down. They knew how to be angry at each other, and not let it interfere with what they did or how they felt about each other. They knew how to fight the good fight.

Mostly.

The only thing that was different about this fight was that it was their first real-full-blown-shouting-match-bordering-on-physical-injury-fight since they had gotten together, and for a moment it felt like anything could tip them in the wrong direction. For a moment, they weren’t sure if they could argue and then almost immediately recover, like they had before. For a moment, it had felt like they really had chased the other away for good.

They did so love to be dramatic.

.

Penny didn’t see what happened after Baz left and Simon went to his room, banging the door shut so forcefully the whole flat complex shook. She didn’t see Simon curl up in his bed with his head in his hands, trying not to panic. She was asleep by the time Simon got it into his head to fly over to Fiona’s flat, only to almost trip over Baz, who after leaving had immediately slumped down on the other side of the door and sat there with his back against the wood for hours, never leaving the complex.

All she saw, was the next morning, when Baz was sitting in his silk pajamas on the kitchen counter, swinging his legs and watching a bare-chested Simon make coffee. Not a trace of their previous fight evident in any manner or expression.

.

The weirdest part was that they never apologized.

Never, not once did she see them say sorry to each other. For anything. Not for the years of fighting, or for accidentally bumping into each other. Not for whatever their argument had been about. She didn’t know whether it was because they knew without having to say anything, or because they were never sorry about anything. She supposed that they just never felt the need to.

.

“What were you guys even fighting about?” asked Penny, accepting a cup from Simon.

Baz glared at Simon over his coffee. “He pulled my nose!”

Penny’s eye twitched.

“What.”

“It’s not my fault! It’s just _there_ ,” said Simon, gesticulating wildly with a coffee mug at Baz’s face. “And it’s too high and there’s a bump and it’s still crooked from the time I broke it! Do you know how long I’ve wanted to just tug it back into place-”

Penny cracked a smile. “So it isn’t straight?”

“That joke was beneath you, Bunce,” said Baz, shaking his head in disappointment, while Simon flailed awkwardly in the background.

.

.

**Things we fight about:**

**No. 1 – Baz’s nose.**

**No. 2 – Therapy.**

**No. 3 – Baz’s level of alive-ness.**

**No. 4 – Simon’s level of usefulness.**

**No. 5 – Baz’s smoking.** (You’re flammable!) (So is everything.) (They’ll kill you.) (I’ll kill you.) _(I’ll kill both of you morons.)_

 **No. 6 – What color Penny should dye her hair next.** (Dark blue. Something subtle and elegant.) (Neon pink and green streaked!) (Stop writing nonsense, Snow.) _(You two are ruining this list!)_

 **No. 7 – Who is the better supervillain.** (Don’t even argue with me on this one. I almost destroyed the whole magickal world.) (On _accident_. I’ll give you points for sheer obliviousness, but you cannot comprehend the intricacies involved in true evil plotting.)

 **No. 8 – Favorite Doctor in Doctor Who.** (10 and 11. What? He’s funny! Also, New Who.) (As ever, you fail to appreciate the classics. All the best doctors, such as 4, are in the early series. I will agree with you about 10, because David Tennant, but 11 and everything else from Steven Moffat is utterly despicable.)

**No. 9 – Anything and everything.**

**No. 10 – Everything else.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's all thank my beta readers for - finally - editing this, and watching Doctor Who. Because I know absolutely jack shit about it.


	5. time for a better day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Theories, Penny and Baz are excellent company, and questions without answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't actually have much to say with this chapter . . . oh, actually yeah. I don't really think they ever find out everything. About the Mage, Simon's parents (the MAGE), the magic, how Lucy died. Which is life, you know, you don't always get that nice wrap up like at the end of a Psych episode.

* * *

“I have a theory!” Penny announced. She sat Simon and Baz on the couch and brought out the whiteboard. They watched her with some concern; she looked tired and frazzled, and had on the same old tee-shirt of Simon’s that she had been wearing for three days. She bore the satisfied, hectic glow that Simon associated with her post-test haze.

“Um, Penny?” Simon asked tentatively, when she did not elaborate beyond pacing between them and the whiteboard, muttering to herself and scratching at her neck. “A theory about what?”

Penelope paused in her pacing and looked at them as if only just remembering they were there.

“ _Magic_.”

“Snow’s magic, or magic in general?” Baz asked suspiciously. He had slumped sideways in lazy irritation and put his feet in Simon’s lap; Simon’s tail curled around his leg as he played with the hem of Baz’s jeans absently.

“ _Both_ ,” Penny said, her eyes gleaming. “That’s the point. I’ve been talking with my dad, and we have a theory about why Simon was so powerful and why his power made the holes.”

They looked at her expectantly, Simon with interest and Baz with growing annoyance.

“Well go on then,” he said. “Explain.”

“Okay, okay.” Penny’s enthusiasm could not be dimmed by Baz’s sneering. “First of all, I think someone did it on _purpose_.”

“Did what?” Simon asked, before Baz could throw a pillow at her and demand that she stop being all high and mighty and just spit it out already.

“You, Simon,” Penny said earnestly. “I think someone wanted you to be the most powerful magician in the world, and they went to extraordinary lengths to make it happen.”

“Who?” Simon asked.

“ _How_?” Baz interjected.

“I don’t know who, but listen. I think your parents must have been magickal, otherwise it wouldn’t have worked. You had to have had some capacity for magic, otherwise there would be no way you would be able to use it at all. Look,” she said, uncapping a marker and drawing a stick figure on the whiteboard. “Here’s how I think your magic worked.

“Here’s you -“ She wrote Simon underneath the stick figure. “- and here’s what happened. I think someone wanted to give you power, so – and this must have happened when you were very little, maybe even before you were even born – I think they accidentally blew a hole in your magic. _Your_ magic, the kind you would have been born with. I think they somehow made you like, a conductor. Not for your own magic, for _all_ the magic. The whole magickal atmosphere. Like this.”

Penny drew a circle in the middle of the stick figure for a hole, and then made yellow lines flow into it. She drew short little yellow lines around Simon, like he was the sun.

“Just like we thought, when you used a little magic the atmosphere could adapt to it, but whenever you went off you were literally tearing up huge chunks in certain places. You felt so powerful all the time because you had access to the whole fucking atmosphere. That kind of power, especially when it wasn’t compatible with you . . .” She shook her head. “It’s a miracle you were able to do control it at all.”

“I didn’t. Not really,” Simon mumbled, looking a little bewildered. Baz had other concerns.

“What do you mean it wasn’t compatible with him?”

“Well, that brings me to another theory,” Penny said excitedly. “One that happens to involve you, Baz.”

“Please, do continue. I’m on the edge of my seat here.”

“My pleasure,” she shot right back. “Where was I . . . oh yes, compatibility. You see, the magickal atmosphere is like its own person.” She scribbled a large green and yellow blob on the whiteboard. “And just like a person, all the magic had its own . . . its own flavor, you know?”

“Yes,” Baz and Simon said together.

“This is only a theory, but I think Simon wasn’t entirely compatible with that magic. If he had the magic he was supposed to have, it would have been a little different . . . tasting. Or feeling, whatever. Not too incompatible, or else you wouldn’t have been able to stand it, but still . . .” She looked awkward.

“I was a crap magician,” Simon said. “What does this have to with Baz?”

“Yes, let’s please turn our focus to what’s really important.”

“Obviously,” Penny said loudly, “you’re guys’ magic was very compatible. Enough that Baz was able to use it even better than Simon. Although I’m sure there are layers and layers of magickal and Normal anomalies surrounding the two of you, so I wouldn’t presume to say that is the whole story. But what got me curious was that while Baz felt the magic leave his family estate, his own magic does not seemed to have suffered for it.”

She paused while both boys seemed mull this over. She was right, of course. Baz’s younger siblings, his stepmother and especially his aunt and father had felt a tenuous little drop in the magickal acuity, but Baz was as sharp as ever.

“From what you’ve told me, Simon, it seems like when you went off at his house it was to, er, _refill_ him on magic, as it were. The reason the hole opened up around his house, when usually it would happen so far away that we never made the connection, was because that magic was already . . . attuned to Baz. He’s the Pitch heir; it was his family blood magic you used. It was _his_ magic, you could say.” She looked at Baz. “Your magic.”

Neither boy seemed to know what to say to this. It made perfect sense.

“Anyway,” Penny said quickly, before they could interrupt her flow again. “My final theory is that when Simon gave his magic to the Humdrum, what he really did was sort of direct the magickal atmosphere that he had been – unknowingly – sucking up and just made it all pout back into itself. Here, see?”

She erased the yellow lines around the Simon stick figure and made all the yellow flow through the hole and back into the green and yellow blob. Like a circle.

“It wouldn’t heal the holes that had already opened, but it at the very least got rid of the Humdrum one and kept any more from being able to open. And like my dad said, the atmosphere will adjust slowly and heal over by itself in time, like any other ecosystem.”

Penelope scribbled Humdrum next to the hole and then stood back, tapping the markers on her chin and looking at her diagram with pride.

“The green is for the magic that wasn’t sucked up,” she added unnecessarily.

Baz had questions.

“In your poorly constructed illustration, it looks like the magic is still flowing through Simon. Even if he can’t use it, he still should be able to feel it, if he was born to a magickal family,” he said, pointing.

“I have a theory for that too,” Penny said immediately.

“Of course you do,” Baz muttered. Penny ignored him.

“Simon’s all numbed out. After years of feeling magic like a firework constantly going off inside him – and outside him too – it would be hard to pick out the subtleties of magic that isn’t even prominent enough to use.

“Of course,” she said quickly, glancing at Simon, who hadn’t said anything and was looking troubled, “I really don’t know for sure. It’s a possibility that you’ll be able to somewhat feel the magic again, after a while, like getting feeling back into scar tissue, but anything is a possibility at this point and there is no way to tell. It would take years though.”

“Is he going to get his magic back?” Baz bluntly asked the question the other two were reluctant to either ask or answer.

“I don’t . . . no. No and I don’t know. There’s nothing to indicate that it would be possible. I’m sorry Simon.”

Simon nodded vaguely, but Baz looked more upset than he did. Simon had another question on his mind.

“But Penny, if you’re right, if someone did do this to me and it wasn’t . . . I don’t know, some freak accident of nature-“ Baz snarled and Simon rubbed his leg soothingly. “-then who did it? Did they do something to my parents? _Why_ did they do it? What was the _point_?”

“I have a theory,” Penny began tentatively, and Baz snorted.

Penny glared at him. “I have a theory,” she repeated firmly. “I think whoever did it was trying to fulfill the prophecy. It’s been around for ages, and everybody knew it way before you ever appeared on the scene, Simon. They must have been a powerful magician to do something like this. Maybe they were experimenting, and their first couple failed attempts started the holes before you were born, and then they didn’t realize they were the ones causing them and thought it was the time when a powerful magician would be needed and kept going.”

“But that’s so stupid,” Simon protested. “That means they would have made me the problem _and_ the solution! They could have just not done anything at all, and maybe the prophecy was really about something else-“

“It’s not stupid, stupid,” Baz interrupted. “It’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy. You _were_ the most powerful magician, and you _did_ appear right when you were needed, and you fixed the problem. The prophecy never said you wouldn’t be a part of the problem yourself. Prophecies are tricky that way. They never tell the whole story. And the point of a self-fulfilling prophecy is that the prophecy itself is what causes it to be fulfilled. Which, if Bunce is right, is exactly what happened.”

Simon bit the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. Baz took his hand and squeezed it lightly, relaxing a little when Simon squeezed back.

Penny looked back and forth between the boys.

“Of course,” she said a little desperately, “this is all speculation. Unless the person who started all this – if they ever existed – comes out and admits everything, we don’t know anything for sure. I just thought you might like a little more plausible an explanation than ‘this is what happened, it’s all your fault, and now it’s over’.”

“No, Penny, thank you for telling me.” Simon smiled at her, and although he looked a little shaken, the smile was real enough. “I think you’re right about all this. I just wish we knew who did it.”

“Yeah.” Penny bit her lip. “They might be dead, though. If they weren’t, you would think they would have stepped up and offered information or something when things started getting bad. They might have helped try to fight the Humdrum.”

“You’d think they’d have told us through the last Visiting,” Baz said.

“Maybe they just couldn’t get through,” Simon suggested. “That can happen sometimes, can’t it?” He looked at Penny.

Penny nodded. “We’ll keep a look out at the next Visiting. No more getting kidnapped by numpties.”

“Shut up, Bunce.”

Simon laughed. He squeezed Baz’s hand and patted the sofa seat next to him. Penny plopped down in relief. They were a little squished, but they were all right.

They would be all right.

.

.

Penelope was actually a fairly decent person for Baz to talk to. She was brilliant, of course, almost as brilliant as Baz himself was, and their opinions differed and coincided enough that they could have an agreeable and stimulating discussion on just about anything.

They weren’t friends, but they didn’t feel like they needed to be. Neither of them were the kind of person who needed a lot of people around them. Baz had minions, Penelope had colleagues, and they both had family. They both had Simon. That was more than enough people to defend from hungry rakshasa for either of them.

They were also some of the few people they could talk to honestly about the Mage. More specifically, about how much they hated him. Not that they would say so in front of Simon. Or at least, Penelope wouldn’t.

She always started with, “I know Simon thought the world of him, but . . .”

Baz made no such concession. He was considerate enough to not start the conversation, but he was always willing to end it.

“He was a greedy, hubristic madman, Bunce. He was Robin Hood’s evil twin. He was a pirate, a self involved git and the French Revolution, all in one man trying to play God. His head was so far up his own ass he hadn't seen sunshine in years. He was a maniac, drunk on power, with the self control and brain power of a two year old. In fact, calling him that would be an insult to toddlers everywhere. And he hurt Simon, which can never been forgiven.”

“God help anyone trying to encroach on your territory,” Penelope said seriously.

Baz nodded in a self-satisfied manner. “Exactly. The Mage and Humdrum are just going to have to take a back seat; I’m the only villain allowed in Snow’s life. He’s mine to torment, and everyone else can take a hike.”

“Well they’re both dead now, but I’m sure you’ll see them in hell and you can tell them so then, and rub it in their faces till Judgement Day and trumpets sound.”

“I will, thank you.”

.

.

.

Started by Penny and stuck to fridge with cat magnet:

**Things we don’t know (and maybe don’t need to):**

**No. 1 – Simon’s magic.**

**No. 2 – Simon’s parents.**

**No. 3 – Vampires.** _(Immortal? Bats? Nicodemus is still cagey as fuck about anything Baz wants to know.)_

**No. 4 – What “the game is on/afoot” does as a spell.**

**No. 5 – How _exactly_ those two idiots got together. ** (Don’t be nosey, Penny.)

**No. 6 – Whatever happened to the dog I possessed, and whether the owner is looking for it.** _(Shh.)_

**No. 7 – When Penny is moving to America.** (If, Snow. If.)

**No. 8 – Whatever the fuck Agatha is doing.** (Who cares?)

**No. 9 – What the future may hold for us.** (Stop trying to be dramatic, Bunce.)

**No. 10 – The Mage . . .**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please comment. It makes my day a little brighter.


	6. that's the beauty of a secret

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon's therapist found out his weakness, and he and Baz have a complicated relationship that nobody really understands. Also, the list you've all been waiting for!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think you guys are gonna like this (admittedly short) chapter. Title is from Halsey's Strange Love, although the only thing that really fits is that line, the title, and this phrase:  
> They think I'm insane  
> They think my lover is strange  
> But I don't have to fucking tell them anything

* * *

Simon’s therapist had figured out his weakness. Whenever she sensed him clamming up, whenever the words were too thick or heavy or _wrong_ on his tongue, making him choke, making his mind go blank, she turned the conversation to Baz.

.

Simon was good at talking about Baz. He had had a lot of practice. Mostly complaining, but he was getting better at talking about the good stuff too. It was the same way he had been complaining to Penny for years, _Baz said this and it made me want to A. Punch him, B. Kiss him, C. All of the above._

He had probably told his therapist more than she ever wanted to know about Baz’s jeans. And his nose. And his hair. And his devious, evil, plotting mind. And the way he smelled. And how infuriatingly brilliant he was at everything – classes (of any and all kinds), footie, magic, hunting, talking, looking good, smelling good.

.

Simon didn’t tell her everything. Not even Penny knew everything about him and Baz, and it was going to stay that way. No one else would be able to make out the infinite multitude of good and evil, hero and villain, fighting and playing and kissing and fire that made up the entirety of their relationship. Simon could tell anyone about the time he had broken Baz’s nose and how it was still a little crooked; or about the time Baz sent a Chimera after him and it went for Baz instead, and when Simon went off, the Chimera was destroyed and Baz’s eyebrows weren’t even singed. But how could anyone else understand that those memories – every punch and insult they had thrown, every night they had spent glaring at each other from opposite sides of their room, every moment where they had hated, obsessed, or provoked each other into losing control – were just as important as the other, kinder ones?

.

(He would never tell anyone what happened the night they first kissed either. It wasn’t anyone’s business but theirs.)

.

Penny had mentioned once that other people either couldn’t believe they were dating or couldn’t believe they were ever enemies. How was Simon supposed to explain that it was both, always both? That they were never friends or enemies or lovers, but fire and ice, hurricanes and lightning, earthquakes and floods, tornadoes and forest fires. Continents colliding. Natural disasters. Bombs.

How was he supposed to explain that there wasn’t a label in the world for what they were? That even when they hated each other, even when they loved each other, they were always the center of each other’s universe?

They were magnets, constantly attracting and repelling each other, planets spinning around in their own gravitational pull, terrible fiery suns reflecting off each other’s light. Stars exploding into black holes and sucking everything up. Magic.

.

He couldn’t. The words didn’t form right in his brain, and by the time they had made it to his mouth they had lost any sense. Baz would have been able to explain.

.

Simon’s therapist didn’t understand, but she nodded and said okay.

.

.

.

** Things I want to do to Baz: **

**No. 1 – Kiss him.**

**No. 2 – Punch him.**

**No. 3 – Touch him.**

**No. 4 – Fight him.**

**No. 5 – Make him laugh.** (A real laugh.)

 **No. 6 – Sleep with him.** (Just sleeping. Nightmares or no.)

**No. 7 – Cook him food/keep him supplied with blood.**

**No. 8 – Protect him.**

**No. 9 – Protect everyone else from him.**

**No. 10 – Just generally be the thing that stands between Baz and the world and keeps them from destroying each other.**

**No. 11 – Touch his hair.**

**No. 12 – Hold his hand.**

**No. 13 – Keep him warm.**

**No. 14 – Keep him from ever losing it as bad as the night we got together.** (Wait. That sounded odd . . .)

**No. 15 – Touch him everywhere.**

**No. 16 – Go over every place I touched with my hands and touch him again with my mouth.**

**No. 17 – Kiss his eyelids.**

**No. 18 – Kiss his widows peak.**

**No. 19 – Kiss his hands.**

**No. 20 – Kiss his neck.**

**No. 21 – Kiss all the way down his chest to his stomach.** (I should probably stop somewhere or this will never end . . .)

 **No. 22 – Have sex with him.** (All the ways. Eventually.)

 **No. 23 – Kiss him until he can’t speak.** (Already did that. Now I want to do it a hundred times more.)

 **No. 24 – Follow him everywhere he might go.** (Okay, now I’m done.)

 **No. 25 – Kiss the tip of his nose where it’s still bent from when I broke it after he pushed me down the stairs.** (Really done now.)

.

Since Baz had a bad habit of sneaking onto lists that had nothing to do with him, Simon took out the list all about him and gave it a proper look over. Then he realized that it just kept going, and going, and after he had spent an hour listing things up to No. 154 with no end in sight, he had to stop before his brain shut down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because their relationship isn't about trust or lust or sex or romance, it's about heroes and monsters and fighting in place and mutual surrender.


	7. here comes the weekend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Normal school is hard and fun and Baz is going to take over the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My beta has informed me that this chapter is impossible. That no one is capable of taking this many classes in the assumed time frame. She was basing this opinion on an episode of Buffy, so I chose to ignore it for the most part. It did cut it down a bit. If it bothers you, think that it happens over a longer period of time, semesters and years. I did a ton of research, so these are all courses available at the real UCL and all the stuff about LSE is also fact, but that does not mean the practical aspects aren't all bullshit. And there is more to come in part two.
> 
> Title line is from the song of the same title by P!nk.

* * *

Penny decided to start university life at UCL, University College London. Simon decided to go with her. They would probably end up taking very different classes, but for the moment it felt good to know that they were at least at the same school, especially with Baz all the way over at LSE plotting world domination.

(London’s School of Economics and Political Science had had as either students or teachers: forty five presidents and prime ministers, twenty eight members of the current House of Commons, forty six members of the House of Lords, twenty six percent of the Noble Prize winners for economics, and out of all the European universities, had turned out the most billionaires. Simon feared for the world when Baz was finished there.)

.

Penny immediately fell in love with the library, and signed them both up for multiple volunteer opportunities. Simon didn’t know what he wanted to do with himself, and nobody was making him think about it yet, so he just took the basic courses for everything: Arts and Humanities, Brain Sciences, Engineering, Laws, Life Sciences, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Medical Sciences, Population Health Sciences, and Social and Historical Sciences.

Which turned out to be a huge mistake.

It was just plain hard, the first few weeks. It was hard getting up and going to a million classes that weren’t seeped in magic, hard talking to the Normals who didn’t avoid him anymore, hard getting into work he didn’t really care about.

It was hard, and he was tired.

.

He dropped a several courses. Laws and medicine were never his things.

.

In Arts and Humanities, he steered clear of any foreign languages, having learned his lesson with Greek and Latin. Baz would have loved them. He took a few rudimentary English Language and Literature classes and found them not that different from Watford’s magic classes. He dropped them too, because they made his head hurt.

.

Slowly, he found himself not minding some of the classes. Then he started looking forward to them.

.

Information Studies was interesting, especially when coupled with a film class. He had taken it just for the heck of it, but it turned out to be enjoyable. His classmates were very friendly, and he learned about camera angles and lighting, and got to work with some theater students, who were all very interesting people. They fooled around with funny skits and music videos. There was a dancer named Darcy who came by to visit her girlfriend, Monica, every Thursday, and Monica would film her practicing dance moves on different sets, keeping every spotlight they had on her.

.

There were a couple Psychology and Language, and Psychiatric classes in Brain Science that were both scary and interesting. He sometimes asked his therapist if she had heard of this thing or that, and by the end of their conversation he would have a paper written. Although it probably wasn’t ethical to have your psychologist helping you with your homework.

.

Simon discovered he actually really liked science. There were all sorts of cool Mathematical and Physical Science classes: Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Physics & Astronomy, Science & Technology Studies, Space & Climate Physics (in the Mullard Space Science Laboratory.) He liked the stability of numbers, and the certainty that came with knowing how the world around him worked. He thought that was probably how magicians felt about words.

.

He took a course about the Americas, mostly because he thought Penny would be living there soon. Penny told him he was ridiculous, but she was taking it too. Anthropology, "The most scientific of the humanities, the most humanistic of the sciences," was another course they took together. To his surprise, Simon found the archeology course fascinating. (Baz called him a twelve year old who was still obsessed with dinosaurs. Simon wondered if they were evolutionally related to vampires.)

.

History was predictably boring, until he found a brilliant professor who made every historical triumph feel like something to celebrate. Penny wondered what the history books would say about them, but Simon wondered if you always knew you were making history, or if most of it was just people trying live their lives and other people calling it history. The history of art was different, but similar. How many artists were actually famous in their time, and how many got a happy ending?

.

Geography wasn’t something Simon had ever been interested in, but he – tentatively – took a beginner’s course in restoration ecology. It was mildly interesting, even more so when he thought of everything in terms of magic. Words like ‘nutrients cycles’ and ‘energy fluxes’ still needed more of a translation, so he went back to the Bunce’s.

Mr. Professor Bunce showed him the charts mapping out the magickally ecological relocation in the holes, and told him the smallest holes could be fully healed, if in a delicately state of stability, in less than twenty years. With his help, Simon wrote a paper based on Penny’s theories and it was presented to the Coven during a grant request for more money to monitor the holes.

To everyone’s surprise, the Families, led by the Pitch-Grimm’s, threw their support behind it. Penny said the paper must have struck a chord with them after seeing the magic ripped out of one of their own ancestral homes.

Simon didn’t think it was the magic leaving, but where it went. Sometimes it was easy to forget who Baz was, when he was lounging in his and Penny’s crappy sofa drinking Starbucks and watching crap telly, but to the Families Baz was Heir Apparent, a prince, a future king, a powerful fire mage descended from two of the most prominent magickal families, and the last of his line.

Baz owned everything he touched, and Simon thought that what had struck a chord with the Families was the idea that Baz was now literally the embodiment of the Pitch magic. And the arrogant bastard knew it.

Simon didn’t study anything economical, political or law-related. He left all that to his supervillain boyfriend.

.

.

Simon was the obsessive sort, the kind of person who was happiest with one thing to focus all his attention on. (Baz, the Humdrum, Baz, magic, Baz, the holes, and Baz, were just a few of his favorite obsessions.) But at least for the moment, he was having fun doing a little bit of everything.

.

.

.

**Things I want to try/do:**

**No. 1 – Keep up with my classes and not completely fail.**

**No. 2 – Help Mr. Professor Bunce with his research.**

**No. 3 – Figure out where vampires fit into science, magickal and otherwise.**

**No. 4 – Find something I'm good at.**

**No. 5 – Help people.**

**To be continued . . .**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's short, I know. The part two is longer, and I think you'll like it more. It will come chapter after next.
> 
> I want to thank everyone for their comments and kudos! They make me so happy! Also, I will be writing the EMDR session, so look forward to that.


	8. why don't you be you, and I'll be me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sexuality can be confusing, tumblr is a scary place, and Baz is unhelpful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First let me apologize for not updating for a good two weeks. Life has been hectic, not for me, but for my beta, so she hasn't been answering my emails. I finally just decided to post anyway. Be warned, this chapter has not been beta'd! I might come back and make some changes if she ever gets around to emailing me her opinion.
> 
> This is a very short chapter, but the next one is longer, and the one after that may be the longest, and they happen to be some of my favorite ones, so look forward to that. My updating schedule is back on track, as much as it ever is.
> 
> A note about the song choice for the title: Let it go by James Bay is a beautiful song that has nothing to with the chapter. I think it's a breakup song, but when I first heard it I really liked it because it made me think of breaking traditional relationship barriers, not forcing parts of your relationship to work a certain way because that's what society says is supposed to happen. Anyway, I really liked that way of thinking about it, and Snowbaz is definitely not a traditional relationship, so I wanted to put it in here. 
> 
> Also, I couldn't think of a song.

* * *

Simon’s therapist said a lot of things.

.

He had been content, at first, to not have to add defining his sexuality to his list of things to think-and-subsequently-worry-about. But now it was bugging him. This was something supposedly small and inconsequential, but it was something in his control, a question he could answer. And he had to have some answer besides “not-straight” right?

“It’s not that simple, Simon,” his therapist said. She didn’t smile too much, which Simon thought was good. Sometimes when she did, it made him uncomfortable, and he wasn’t sure why. He didn’t hang around with a lot of smiley people. He had mentioned that to her once, along with the fact that if Baz didn’t like someone’s smile, if he thought it was too happy or patronizing or pitying or encouraging or _anything_ , he usually made it his personal mission to make sure they never smiled in his vicinity again. Maybe that’s why his therapist didn’t do it a lot.

“Your sexual orientation isn’t the limit of your attraction, but the sum of it,” she said. “If Baz is the only person you’ve ever really been attracted to, you could literally identify as Baz-sexual. If you think you could realistically be attracted to girls and boys, you could say you’re bisexual. But then, you said you’ve never been attracted to someone who you didn’t already know really well, so maybe you don’t feel primary sexual attraction, which would make you demisexual. And of course, sexual attraction and romantic attraction aren’t always the same thing to everyone. Your romantic orientation might be different from your sexual one. And it gets even more complicated when you take into account the complexities of gender.”

Simon looked at her through the screen, bewildered. She sighed, not unkindly.

“My point is that sexuality isn’t always so simple. You might say you’re one thing right now, and then you realize ten years later you’re attracted to someone you didn’t even consider. How you identify is a choice, even if your sexuality itself isn’t. It’s easier to base your identity on past experiences rather than all the possible future ones. Do you love Baz?”

“Yes,” Simon said, before he had fully processed the change in subject. “Wait, what?”

“If you definitely love and are attracted to Baz, and don’t see that changing anytime soon, then isn’t that all you need to know for now? I know it’s an important subject to you, but it’s not the most prominent thing you need to worry about, and it is not something you can work out for certain in one conversation.”

She suggested that if it was really bothering him, ( _Of course it’s bothering you,_ Baz’s voice sneered in his head. _If it wasn’t, why would you mention it? Honestly, are you sure this woman’s credentials are authentic?_ ) ( _Shut up,_ Simon thought. _If you care so much, come over here and tell her that yourself._ ) then he should look around on tumblr and check what labels were out there. If there was anything that felt like it might fit, he could try it on for awhile and see if it worked for him. He could always change it later.

( _As if your sexuality is just like choosing a pair of shoes._ )

( _Shut. Up._ )

.

When Baz – the real Baz, not the one making snooty remarks in Simon’s head – got home that day, he found Simon lying spread eagled on the floor with his arm thrown plaintively over his face, nursing a terrific headache. His laptop was open on the coffee table.

“What’s wrong with you?” Baz nudged Simon’s leg with his toe distastefully.

“Nothing,” Simon muttered. “Jus’ overwhelmed.”

“By what? The state of that floor?” Baz tossed his bags onto the sofa and strode into the kitchen.

“Did you know there’s something called What The Fuck-sexual?” Simon asked, as Baz came back in with a reusable plastic McDonald’s straw cup full of blood.

“That might be the most inane thing I’ve ever heard, Snow,” Baz said, picking his way over Simon’s sprawling limbs and flopping gracefully onto the couch, sipping blood between his fangs. “You should be banned from tumblr, before those people give you any more idiotic ideas.”

Simon glared at him and decided that he would never _ever_ identify as Baz-sexual, even if it was the only label that was technically correct.

He wouldn’t give his smug, graceful, tosser of a boyfriend the satisfaction.

.

.

Thought up by Simon, who then mentally threw it away because it felt so stupid:

** Sexualities I kind of identify with: **

**No. 1 – Bisexual.**

**No. 2 – Pansexual.**

**No. 3 – Demisexual.** (Although that seems to refer to a level of sexuality rather than an orientation.)

 **No. 4 – Straight.** (With an obvious exception.)

 **No. 5 – Gay.** (Then maybe Agatha was the exception? Was I ever attracted to Agatha beyond her being an attractive person?)

**No. 6 – Heteroflexible.**

**No. 7 – Homoflexible**. (Are these two different from 4  & 5?)

 **No. 8 – Pomosexual.** (No label!)

**No. 9 – WTFsexual.**

**No. 10 – ~~Bazsexual.~~  **

He did not even try to get into the different romantic orientations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who knows if real therapists are as knowledgeable about sexuality as Simon's seems to be? Anyway, point is, for some people it's very cut and dry, and for some people it's not.
> 
> Thank you for all the comments and kudos! See you next week.


	9. all the lonely people

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More fun classes, people, and photogenic vampires.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On time, what's up! Who da man? I da man. I always suspected.
> 
> Ahem. Anyway. I think you guys will like this chapter, at least I can't imagine why you wouldn't, at least the end part. Next up is my favorite, so look forward to it!

* * *

Simon felt his muscles itching for action. He flew and ran (a lot) and wrestled with Baz, but it didn’t feel like enough. At first he didn’t want to take up sword craft again (the Mage’s Sword wasn’t coming back, and anything else felt like cheating) but Penny pointed out that there were many kinds of sword fighting. His therapist pointed out that if it was something he was really interested in, there was no reason not to look into it more.

Baz pointed out that he was going to need _something_ if the goblins still had a bounty on his head, which they probably did, because goblins were idiots. Then he told him to stop being a prat.

So Simon looked up what sword fighting classes there were in the area. The amount of information that came back was alarming – there was fencing, medieval-to-renaissance swordplay, and several Eastern styles that were connected to different martial arts. The martial arts led him to discovering Tai Chi. Simon spread out the separate classes throughout the semesters, but in the end he decided to try everything.

After a lot of convincing, Simon also got Baz to take the different martial arts and boxing with him. This turned out to have been a brilliant idea. It had never been so much fun to try and kill each other. Not having to _succeed_ in killing each other really made all the difference.

Simon felt his muscles sing.

.

There were plenty of sports clubs at LCU, including rugby, taekwondo, and football, but Simon didn’t join any of them. He preferred sports to be friendly games – and save all his competitiveness for when he could play against Baz.

Football was still something he liked to play for fun, even he wasn’t interested in getting good enough to play on an official team. Luckily, there was no shortage of potential football friends.

The people. The people! There were so many of them! They came from all over the world, with their accents and clothes and ideas. There was an American in his archeology classes who knew more about the prehistoric eras than the professors did. Sarahi, a young woman in one of his psychology classes, had served in the Israeli Army and was studying to be a teacher. He met a nearly completely blind and deaf person named Zenshiro who was a vocal advocate for students with disabilities. They introduced him to Kamran and Jaleh, two out of three triplets who were studying medicine and law, respectively, and invited him to join the LGBT+ Student Network.

Penny always said she didn’t have time for more friends, but she still joined several societies, including the Women’s Network, and went with Simon to any meeting or show he inevitably got invited to. She ended up signing him up for everything she volunteered for, and they spent a lot of time working at stands, bringing in funds to fight cancer.

.

Simon took several short courses in Fine Arts. Baking quickly became a favorite. Being hungry and then being able to make yourself good food was magic in of itself. The independence in the ability to feed oneself was invigorating. He convinced Baz to convince Cook Pritchard to send them her recipe for sour cherry scones. Making them was almost as good as eating them, and the work involved made the scones taste that much better. Kneading (punching) dough was more than satisfying.

Neither Penny nor Baz could cook for their life, so at first they had mostly just had takeaway. They could make reasonable amounts of food with magic, but it was never as filling or as tasty as the real, homemade stuff. Baz complained he put too much butter in everything and Penny muttered about magic being much easier, but Simon knew they were grateful to have something besides Chinese takeaway, **_“a feast fit for a king”_** or Mrs. Bunce’s curry.

.

Simon was crap at most art, but photography turned out to be fun; he had lots of things he wanted to take pictures of, and the darkroom was pleasantly peaceful. Mostly. His wings and tail still got in the way, and those trays of chemicals were expensive.

Simon found out that vampires did indeed show up in photographs, and that his vampire very much liked to be photographed. Baz soaked up attention like a sponge, positive or negative. It didn’t help that he did not appear to have a bad side.

“A photogenic vampire,” Penny snorted. “Who’d have thought?”

Penny had a horrible camera smile, but Simon caught her and Baz on film arguing enjoyably over original Greek translations of Homer’s works. Penny was in a pale blue jumper that might have been Simon’s, and she was leaning forward with her hair pulled back and her eyes shining behind cat eyed glasses. Baz’s dark hair was falling in his face and he brushed it back behind his ear impatiently, which had worked until he started shaking his head emphatically and it whipped against his jaw. He was in his jeans, which Simon could never stop staring at, and an actual black cotton tee-shirt. Simon had not been sure his boyfriend even owned something as common as a plain tee-shirt.

He put this picture with his other favorites:

Baz relaxing on a park bench with his arms thrown over the back and his head tilted up, his eyes closed and a tiny smile playing about his face as he caught the last bit of dim evening sunlight.

Penny asleep on a pile of books, her glasses askew and her hair dyed half green and half purple.

Baz playing with his magickal fire while lighting a cigarette with his wand, the flames illuminating every sharp feature, making him seem both more dead and more alive than ever.

A picture Baz had taken (snuck) of him stretching his wings out, like a cat in a patch of sunlight, the red scaly hide glowing scarlet in the midday sun.

Baz frowning while playing the violin.

His new school campus, along with several of the friendlier people in his classes.

Baz at Starbucks, drinking his candy coffee.

A few of the holes; something about the chemicals involved with developing film made the boundary between the magickal atmosphere and the hole visible to a carful observer, like a shimmer of heat wave.

Baz in Simon’s jumper and his own jeans.

Baz sneering.

Baz in a suit.

Baz in a button down with the collar undone.

.

(Okay, so most of them were of Baz.)

.

Baz with his hair slicked back, glaring at the camera with a bloody lip and busted nose that was threatening to turn into a black eye.

Both of them asleep in Simon’s bed, about to be awoken very rudely by an irate Penny who would keep shouting that they were late until their ears rang. (She had still found time to take the picture.)

Both of them kissing while wrapped in Simon’s wings.

Both of them in their Watford uniforms, with Penny in a separate one.

Both of them in the changing room at boxing, with towels around their necks, bruises on their skin and challenges in their smiles, even as Baz rested an arm on Simon’s shoulders and leaned in to whisper something scathing to make him laugh.

Baz in his silk pajamas and dark blue dressing gown, brushing his fangs.

Baz asleep shirtless, late in the morning.

Both of them shirtless, one late night when they got drunk and Simon’s was leaning over Baz’s shoulder, trying to hold onto him, light his fag and tug away the shirt in Baz’s hand with his teeth all at the same time, while Baz looked off to the side, holding both their beers and trying to guide the flame to the end of his fag without lighting either of them on fire.

Their socked feet tangled together.

Their bare feet tangled together.

Their hands tangled together.

A couple blurry ones that Penny had taken, showing the progress of one of his and Baz’s fights – arguing, shouting, pushing, wrestling, laughing, kissing.

.

Baz smirking up at him from where he was lying on his stomach in bed with nothing but a sheet covering him from the waist down, his hair a mess and his skin flushed with new blood.

.

(Whatever. Baz liked having his picture taken.)

.

.

.

** Things I want to try/do (continued): **

**No. 6 – Make enough Normal friends (acquaintances, sorry, Penny!) for a friendly football game.** (Maybe I could get Baz to come with. And then watch from the sidelines as he crushes everyone in his path.)

 **No. 7 – Go green.** (Baz was horrified when I lowered the thermostat in the flat and bought used clothes and DVD’s. Magic can replace most of the environment-harmful appliances, so Penny set up a bunch of long-term spells for heating and cleaning. It helps save on the bills, too.)

 **No. 8 – Gardening.** (I don’t know where. The roof? That’s a thing, isn’t it? Rooftop gardens?)

 **No. 9 – Travel.** (Everywhere. The world. The universe.)

**No. 10 – Take pictures of everything.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and goodnight.


	10. trying to fight when you feel like flying

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sassy wings and tail, Baz is weird, and flying is magic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my favorite chapter, and I am not at all ashamed to say it is because of how much I love Simon's wings and tail. I am actually very disappointed in the fandom's lack of appreciation for these wonderful things. I would kill a hundred Humdrums to be able to fly.

* * *

Simon’s therapist talked about his wings and tail.

.

Simon said they were annoying, but annoying didn’t cut it. He was even clumsier than before, knocking over anything that wasn’t bolted down with his unmanageable new appendages. He wasn’t sure how to control them, because while they reacted just like extra arms or legs would, he had no idea what to do with a tail and wings. Spelling them invisible was a pain, and he felt constricted whenever he was stuck inside without company and his wings unspelled. They limited what he could do, and he didn’t like being limited.

But worst of all they didn’t feel like _his_. Like they were a part of him. They were just these weird things that followed him around and made other people nervous.

They reminded him of his magic. But he had known what his magic was ever since he had first gone off, and he had learned to make it his. He didn’t know what these things were.

Simon’s therapist asked if he was going to get them removed. He probably could, somehow, but he had not seriously considered it. If Baz or Penny had wanted them gone he would not have minded a twit, but neither of them had said anything beyond agreeing that they were mildly annoying to deal with. Actually, Baz seemed to like them. Simon thought he probably liked them to have as much nuttiness physically as each other, so they matched again. He never minded when the tail lashed around when Simon was upset or when it wrapped around his leg or waist while they were tangled together in bed. Baz was weird that way.

Simon said probably not anytime soon. His therapist suggested he try to start thinking of them as part of him, so they didn’t feel so invasive.

“Try looking at them in the mirror, or touching them,” she said. “Look at the places where they’re attached to your body. Practice moving them around. If you aren’t planning to get rid of them it might be a good idea to try and get used to them. Make them yours.”

.

He tried the mirror, and felt like he was looking at a stranger.

.

He tried in the shower, with warm water falling all around him. Simon closed his eyes and tentatively ran a hand down his damp back, over his shoulder blade to where the wings were attached to either side of his spine. He felt where wet skin transitioned smoothly into wet, rough, scaly hide. It was so thick he could barely feel his hand’s touch.

Baz had mentioned once that his wings and tail were warmer than the rest of him, and he had been right. The dragon hide seemed to carry its own heat, stretched over thick knobby bones. Simon flexed his shoulders, and then cautiously flexed his wings. They moved together and apart from the place where they were joined to his back. Simon felt a shy little thrill run down his spine. He had fucking _wings_.

He moved his fingers delicately over the rest of the wings. They really were a bit like extra arms. The bone that would be the humerus bone in an arm was thick and sturdy, connecting from his back to the high, elbow-ish joint that rose above his head. But the second one, that would be the ulna and radius, and that stretched all the way back down to his knees when they were folded, was hollow like a bird’s. Dr. Wellbelove had x-rayed them, so he knew that the three long, almost finger-like bones that spread down from the high joint were also hollow, with smaller joints separating them into a couple parts. Phalanges, he thought they were called. At the tips of the high joint and of the hollow bones were small grey spiky claws, like fingernails, which were hard and dull to his touch. Between the phalanges stretched a thick, but surprisingly flexible, rubbery membrane. It bent easily under his fingers, and he wondered how painful it would be to rip it. Ouch.

His wings jerked slightly under his touch. He supposed they didn’t enjoy the thought of being hurt. He knew how they felt. Wait, of course he did. Stupid.

Simon tried flexing his wings again, from the joint where they met his back, and then from the joint where all the bones met like the spokes of a fan. They expanded behind him until they bumped into the shower walls. They were too big to open fully, but it felt wonderful to stretch them out. They never really hurt, even when he accidentally banged them into stuff – he supposed dragon skin must be too tough for that – but sometimes they got cramped if he kept them folded too long or lay on them funny. There must be quite a bit of muscle between the skin and bone to support his weight in the air and for him to be able to move them easily.

When he ran his fingers across a thinner patch of membrane, it twitched. He thought that might be muscle too, not just skin. It was more sensitive than the rest of his wings, and if he held it up to the light he could see the faint silhouette of veins running under the surface.

They really did feel warm.

The water had gone cold. With his hands guiding the ends, Simon wrapped his wings around himself like a blanket. The dragon skin shone dark red or black depending on the way the light hit it. They were so big that they easily overlapped and practically sealed him in. If he had crouched down a little, they would have been able to cover his entire body from the spray. It was kind of . . . nice.

Okay. This wasn’t so bad. He could get used to this.

The tail was a little different. He didn’t know what to _do_ with it. Tucked up under his wings, he ran his hand down his spine to his tail bone. Which now had an actual tail attached to it.

When he had summoned his wings, he had been thinking of the dragon, but he had also been distracted by the horrifying thought that _he_ was the one doing this. He was the one making the holes and the Humdrum. That was where the devil tail had come from. From the thought of being the real villain in their little fairytale.

The tail was about one meter long, and it was thicker at the base than at the end. The skin was the same thick, leathery stuff from his wings, but it was long, ropey, and as flexible as a cat’s. There must be a ton of vertebrae in there. It was weird to think that his spine had practically doubled in length, and half of it was sticking outside his body.

The tip was the especially scary part. A thick black spade with sharp edges had grown out of the end of his tail like a single pointy tooth. It was hard, like the claws on his wings, and a shiny black. Would he have to file and polish these parts to keep them sharp and shiny?

He tried to wrap his hand around the tail, but it jerked away and lashed impatiently. Funny, it never did that when Baz held it. Then again, it seemed to like Baz more than it liked him. It was always wrapping around his leg. Or was Simon the one doing that without realizing? It was so _weird_ to feel it moving without him consciously deciding to anything.

“What am I going to do with you?” he sighed. The tail lashed again and knocked over the shampoo bottles. Simon’s wings shook themselves out a little, as if to say they highly disapproved of such behavior. At least someone was on his side.

He tried to move his tail, first from one side and then to the other. The tail moved, but then it snapped away like a whip cracking. He sighed, unfurling his wings and shivering a little in the cold water before turning off the shower and stepping out into a chilly draft, dripping water everywhere.

He had a split second to realize his mistake, and then his foot slipped on the wet tiles. He lurched forward, his other leg coming forward to try and catch him, but he knew from experience that it wouldn’t be enough to keep his momentum from crashing him into the floor.

At the last second his tail swept up behind him and his wings rose off his shoulders. He had closed his eyes, waiting for the impact and subsequent pain, but it didn’t come. He opened his eyes, and found himself balancing on one foot on a dry patch of floor, with his tail stretched out in the opposite direction and his wings poised like his arms, cupping the air in an effort to slow his fall.

Slowly, he righted himself. His wings settled back and his tail swished behind him. A little smugly, Simon thought.

Well.

.

He was feeling pretty good that night, with Baz in his bed and him in Baz’s lap. They kissed long and languidly, fingers curling into hair and running lazily over their clothes. Baz had his back to the wall, his head resting against it, and Simon knelt half on his legs and kissed him again and again. His tail curled possessively around Baz’s waist, and that time Simon knew he was the one doing it.

He grinned into Baz’s mouth, and Baz raised an eyebrow. His eyes widened exponentially when Simon drew his wings up and pulled Baz away from the wall so he could wrap them around both their bodies. His wings overlapped each other until he and Baz were sitting in the middle of a cozy cone-shaped cocoon of comfort. The light filtering through the scarlet membrane was soft and rosy. Dim, but enough to see the satisfyingly surprised expression on Baz’s face.

“You’ve been practicing,” Baz muttered, their faces so close that Simon felt his lips move, brushing against his own. This felt nice. Having Baz to so close, so warm, so safe in their own protected place. He liked this. He liked being wrapped around Baz like this, he liked having him right here at his fingertips. He had him trapped here, in this small warm space he had created just for them.

And it was so very warm.

He didn’t feel like a stranger when he saw Baz touching him. His tail slipped under Baz’s shirt. Simon kissed the stupid smug smile right off of Baz’s beautiful face.

.

.

Simon’s therapist said a lot of things.

But.

But one day, while Penny and Baz were out and he was stuck inside with his wings and tail visible, he sneaked up onto the roof of the flat complex.

He jumped.

It took a few seconds of outright falling, and then his wings snapped open and cupped the air, slowing his decent. He beat them once, twice, three times, and then he was soaring above the tops of buildings. He caught an updraft, folded his wings and plummeting to the ground in a dive, catching himself just in time and evening out, only to rocket back up.

He glided for a while, just drifting and letting the air currents take him wherever, his tail whipping behind him. It turned out he really, really, _really_ could not fly without his tail; it was crucial to both balance and steering, and helped him take sharp turns around building corners without losing speed.

The wind was in his face and hair and out stretched arms. The cold air brought tears to his eyes. He didn’t even realize he was grinning until his cheeks started to hurt, and then he laughed and whooped and tried to do a flip (and ended up nearly crashing through someone’s window.)

This. This thing. This thing he had always wanted to do, this thing that magic had never been able to fully give him. This thing that _his_ magic _had_ given him – this thing that made his heart soar, that made moving quick and easy and _wonderful_ , that made him feel on top of the world, without the imminent danger of going off. This new magic.

Flying was so much better than therapy

.

.

.

** Things I can do with my wings and tail: **

**No. 1 – Fly.**

**No. 2 – Avoid public transportation.**

**No. 3 – Move without feeling like a klutz**. (Only in the air, but it’s still a novel experience. No wonder Baz is always so smug.)

**No. 4 – Not constantly fall flat on my face when I’m on the ground.**

**No. 5 – Hold/carry/move things with my tail**. (Always useful, even if still doesn’t listen to me half the time.)

**No. 6 – Keep me and Baz warm.** (Penny too, sometimes.)

**No. 7 – Keep the rain off.**

**No. 8 – Carry Baz and Penny.** (Only if it’s an emergency – they’re heavy.)

**No. 9 – Feel less Normal without magic.**

**No. 10 – Be constantly reminded about what happened.**

Right now No. 10 is a bad thing. It’s easier to not think of things when you don’t have ineradicable evidence hanging off your back. But maybe someday he might be able to remember without feeling sick to his stomach. Maybe someday there might be more good memories connected to his wings and tail than bad ones. After trying for years to not think about thing he didn’t like, that thought felt an awful lot like hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please comment, if only to voice your appreciation for my beta's timely edits.


	11. and you said you are unconsolable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sad-sack Nicodemus, stubborn Simon, huffy Baz, and Ebb shipped snowbaz before anyone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Close counts, right? Kinda. It's partly my fault for not reminding my beta until the night it was due and partly her fault for not checking for mold on the cake and being to polite to comment on the strange taste.
> 
> Anyway, I love Nicodemus (you'll be seeing a lot more of him in part 2), I love him very much, and I think we can all agree Ebb is amazing, so this happened.
> 
> Title from Unconsolable by X Ambassadors, a wonderful song and a heartbreaking but still happy ending video.

* * *

They still saw Nicodemus. Sometimes. Simon made sure of it.

.

Nicodemus was different from Ebb. He was meaner and angrier, even in his grief. But when Simon found him again in the pub at Covent Garden, staring morosely into an empty glass like he was wondering how much alcohol it would take to actually drown himself, Simon was again struck by the siblings jarring similarities.

Simon sat down at his table, and after the first few times, Nicodemus stopped digging his heels in like a stubborn mule. Simon was dating Baz Pitch, he knew all about stubbornness and was content to wait.

He didn’t want Nicodemus to be alone.

.

Nicodemus cried like Ebb once had when Simon told him about how she had cried for him. Simon cried a little too. He told Nicodemus how reassuring she had been, always crying, always making your own sadness feel more validating.

“She was always such a crybaby,” Nicodemus said, rubbing his eyes furiously. “Stupid girl.”

.

Baz came sometimes.

(“Someone has to save you from yourself. Walking alone into a vampire bar without even your wings uncovered – honestly, Snow.”)

(“You just want to see him cry.”)

(“Yes.”)

Baz was the one who made Nicodemus angry. He still refused to let Nicodemus into Watford, even just to visit Ebb’s grave. Simon sometimes thought Baz was for anger what Ebb had been for sadness.

“Son of a Pitch,” Nicodemus would spit.

Baz would smile with all his fangs. “Petty.”

Nicodemus seemed to like getting mad at Baz, or at least was appreciative of an outlet besides crying. Which was good, because Baz had no intention of playing nice.

In between blatant showing off of his fangs and magic, and traded ill disguised jabs, Baz fished for information. About his mother, mostly. Nicodemus was less than forthcoming, and more than often than not Baz would threaten to light the place up, or storm out in disgust.

Sometimes Simon followed him. Sometimes he knew it was better to let him sulk.

.

Simon told Nicodemus about Ebb as he had known her at Watford. About her goats, and how much she loved them and the handful of kids who would stop by to say hi. About the many, many times she had spelled him and Baz apart just in the nick of time. About her barnyard knickknacks and old Watford jumper. How had she still looked so much like her brother. How she had hated using magic for anything outside her quiet life. How much Simon had loved her.

It was nice to talk to someone who had loved Ebb too. To see the aftermath of her death in her lookalike brother, and know it wasn’t just him who had a giant hole ripped through his chest.

.

Eventually, Nicodemus started talking about Ebb too, the Ebb he had run around with at Watford, before everything. Before Simon and Baz and Penelope and the Mage and the Humdrum. He talked about how they had been able to use each other’s magic artifacts, and how powerful they both were. Powerful enough to rule the school, but Ebb had never wanted the attention, and he had always stayed with his sister, running around in the background doing all sorts of mischief. Until one day he hadn’t.

Baz also listened to these stories. Almost all of them included his aunt, and consequently his mother. It became obvious that Nicodemus still held quite the torch for Fiona. Baz would always glare at him whenever he spoke a little too fondly of her fierce laugh and the one time she had set his eyebrows on fire. The girls had laughed themselves silly watching him run around in a panic, until Ebb had taken pity on him and thought to **_“make a wish”_** him out. It had taken months for his eyebrows to grow back.

Nicodemus never looked particularly sorry for what he said, but then, neither did Baz.

In return, Simon told him everything. He wanted to tell him. He wanted Nicodemus to know how sad Ebb was without him, and how happy she had been with her life.

.

Simon talked to Nicodemus, because he could not talk to his sister.

Simon wished he could talk to Ebb. He wanted to sit with her in the barn among the knickknacks, warmed by the fat potbellied stove and tell her about the Mage. About Natasha Pitch. About how Nicodemus had helped them, and how he still loved and missed her more than anything else.

Most of all Simon wanted to tell Ebb about Baz. He wanted her to see them standing next to each other. He wanted her to see what they had become.

It had always been her who was in charge of separating them when, in their earlier years, they had lost any semblance of restraint in a writhing mass of bony preteen limbs tussling on the grass, punching and kicking the shit out of each other in an angry, physical frenzy for control.

(Before they had known that they would someday have to really kill each other. Before they knew what being enemies meant beyond thumping each other. Back when they had thumped each other just because they wanted to.)

When their altercations had occurred inside, it had usually been Ms. Possibelf’s duty, and then later Penny’s, to spell them apart when they got carried away. But when Simon remembered their fights, they were always accompanied by Ebb’s shout of **_“Keep your distance!”_** and the feeling of her powerful magic wrapping around him like a big furry hug that smelled of rain and damp earth, tearing him and Baz apart and throwing them to the ground.

(He had always liked the feeling of her magic.)

Simon could remember the dazed, angry, and faintly affronted feeling that would come with being hauled up by his elbow by Ebb’s strong hands; Baz always tugged along at her other side, with both of them twisting in her grip, still eager to get at each other. She had been one of the few who was never afraid to get between them when they were in a snit, but she had never been angry.

“Easy boys,” she had laughed, catching them under the arms and half heaving them into the air. They had struggled mightily, but at twelve years old, with bruises on their knees from football and stained uniforms from their recent scuffle in the dirt, they had been no match for Ebb’s strength and experience – physical or magickal.

“A pair o’ troublemaker like yerselves might regret gettin’ rid of each other so soon,” she would say, spelling them down on opposite sides of the cast-iron potbelly stove and making them tea. She had let them eat Rich Tea biscuits and coffee diluted with sugar and cream, and shout at each other until they had cooled off enough to go back to their room.

Simon wanted her to see them the way they were now. She had seen them through the first seven or so years of their relationship and possibly understood it better than anyone else; it seemed cruel that she had missed the best part.

Then he thought about the conversations he had had with her at the beginning of the year and felt better.

.

.

.

** Things to think about: **

**No. 1 – Ebb.**

**No. 2 – Baz.** (Like I can help that one.)

 **No. 3 – PTSD stuff.** (It feels like I’ll be thinking about this for the rest of eternity.)

 **No. 4 – Nicodemus.** (I have an idea, but I don’t know how long it will take to get Baz to agree to it.)

 **No. 5 – Penny’s eighth year spell.** (She didn’t graduate Watford, but she still sees it as a challenge and is asking around for ideas. She wants it to be spectacular.)

**No. 6 – Class work.**

**No. 7 – Mr. Professor Bunce’s research about the holes.** (This one is my therapist’s idea. She thinks it will be restorative.)

**No. 8 – More things that help.**

**No. 9 – ~~The Mage.~~  **

**No. 10 – The future? Maybe.** (I know I should, but I don’t know how.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, please comment below, if only to yell at me for slipping so soon after getting back on the updating horse.
> 
> Almost the last chapter! Last one is next, and then a short bonus chapter after that.


	12. so you got the best of me, so amazingly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Moody Baz, pyromania, questions, answers, and viking funerals. Heroes and villains livin' the fairytale.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no excuse except that I suck. For some reason I couldn't wrap my head around the editing on this chapter, and I'm still not satisfied with it, but I don't know what else to do, and you've waited long enough.
> 
> Also, this has mostly been about Simon's crazy, and it's only fair to let our favorite mad pyromaniac villain have center stage for a bit.

* * *

“Don’t even think about it, Snow.”

Simon’s finger froze inches from Baz’s face. Baz opened one eye halfway and glared until he retracted his hand. Simon adjusted his camera bag and sat down next to where Baz was lying sprawled on their landing, with his head hanging upside down over the top step. His violin lay half on his stomach, and he was holding the bow loosely in his hand.

“Were you waiting for me?” Simon asked curiously.

“Well I can’t go in without an invitation, can I, Snow?” said Baz, with maddening superiority.

Simon’s brow furrowed. “You’re always welcome here, Baz. And you’ve snuck in loads of times before.”

“Yes, well, it appears Bunce has upped your security after the last time I came in through your window. As if I’m not the only vampire in the world who would bother breaking into a flat whose occupants’ most prized possessions are books.” Baz sneered at thin air, twirling his bow idly. Simon followed the movement with his eyes.

“Were you playing?”

“Mm. It gets somewhat boring out here. And your neighbors got mad when I set the smoke alarm off. I don’t think they like me very much.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“It is quite the mystery. No doubt they are jealous that they don’t have tall, dark, handsome strangers waiting for them.”

“That must be it.” Simon stood up and held out a hand. Baz took it, not quite meeting his eyes. Simon hauled him up and unlocked the door. “I’ll talk to Penny about finding some way to let you in without anyone else sneaking past.”

“That would be appreciated, Snow,” Baz drawled, sweeping past him into the flat and depositing his bags onto the sofa. “Lest someone get it into their head to take out their jealousies on my poor, innocent, unsuspecting self.”

“I think you could take them,” Simon said, kicking off his shoes and padding into the kitchen.

“So do I, but it would be a dreadful mess.”

“You could do it without the mess,” Simon called. His voice was muffled, and Baz suspected he had his head stuck in the fridge.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Baz dropped onto the sofa and ran his bow lazily over the strings of his violin. They made a harsh trilling noise. He grimaced, his lip curling derisively. Simon wandered back in with a ham and cheese sandwich half in his hand and half in his mouth.

“Aww ‘oo mhay?”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

Simon rolled his eyes and swallowed. “I asked if you were okay.”

“Of course,” Baz drawled, but there was something off about his voice. Simon thought if Baz had a tail it would be lashing about restlessly. “Why would you even ask?”

“Dunno,” Simon said, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. “You just seem . . . I don’t know.”

“Well when you figure it out, you will let me know, won’t you?” Baz said carelessly. He plucked a few more discordant notes.

Simon rolled his eyes and went into his room. He heard Baz start playing something that he recognized as Poor Unfortunate Souls. Baz had a bad habit of playing Disney villain songs when he was in a mood. Simon shook his head and started to put away his photography stuff. The bag with his tripod could just stand in the corner, but his camera had its own shelf. The film was almost all used up; he would need to replace it soon. He chucked a few extra rolls into his bag and threw away a used canister.

.

Simon thought he smelled smoke. He sniffed a few times, and tried to ignore the prickly feeling running down his neck. He wasn’t going off. He couldn’t go off anymore.

.

The camera had seemed a bit blurry that day; there were probably fingerprints on the lens. He would need to polish it-

_“Well when you figure it out, you will let me know, won’t you?”_

Simon dropped his camera. Baz’s voice had sounded just like it always had before . . . when he was trying to make Simon hate him. When he was pretending to be okay. When he was being the villain.

.

Simon definitely smelled smoke.

.

(God. Baz.)

.

The kitchen was on fire, and Baz was in the middle of it. Simon didn’t think before grabbing his arms and hauling him the hell out of there. Baz didn’t fight him. He let Simon drag him away, to the other end of the reception room, and push him up against the wall next to the window.

“Put it out,” Simon said.

Baz was looking down his nose at him, with an odd, quiet expression that Simon couldn’t quite place. It looked like it could easily turn into either affection or sneering, although the two were not mutually exclusive with Baz.

“Put it out!”

Simon gripped Baz’s shoulders and shook him roughly. He wanted to thump the sense back into him.

“ _Baz_. Put it out.”

Baz’s eyes slid to the fire slowly eating away at the curtains, towels and tabletop. Simon could see the flames reflected in his grey eyes, dark with hunger. He didn’t let go of Baz’s shoulders. Baz’s eyes slid back to his. Simon held his gaze, and growled low and scraping in his throat. Pushed his jaw out. Stood his ground.

 ** _“Make a wish!”_** Baz said, almost lazily, and flicked his wand in the direction of the kitchen.

The flames died with a wheezy cough of smoke. Simon thought his ears were ringing, until he realized it was the smoke alarm going off. Baz pointed his wand at that too.

 ** _“Shut up!”_** he said blandly.

The alarm stopped mid-wail.

Simon took a deep, smoky breath. And coughed. And shoved Baz against the wall.

“What the hell were you trying to do, you arsehole!”

Baz pouted. “I was trying to use the oven. I think it’s broken; it wasn’t responding to my magic at all.”

“Did you try _turning it on_?”

“I just said it wasn’t responding.”

Simon shoved him again. Hard. Baz’s head banged against the wall, and he didn’t flinch.

“You _arsehole_. You didn’t need to use the oven - you needed to set something on fire. Fucking pyro.”

Baz leaned back against the wall, his whole countenance drooping tiredly.

“What do you want from me, Snow?”

Simon kissed him. He kissed him until Baz melted and leaned into him. Simon trailed one hand down his shoulder, grazing his arm, and gently undid his fingers from around his wand. He slipped it into his own pocket.

“Fucking pyro,” he said again, biting Baz’s lip harshly. Baz groaned, looping his arms around Simon’s neck and leaning closer.

“Baz,” Simon muttered in between kisses. “Baz. Baz. _Baz_.” Because he had spent eight years avoiding saying that name and now he felt the need to say it again and again. And again. (And again.)

“You saved me,” Baz murmured, turning his face to rest on Simon’s shoulder.

“Baz. Of course I did.” Simon gripped him tightly.

“My hero.” Sarcastic as his words were, Baz’s voice sounded like he was laughing. Or crying. “Snow. Simon. You’ll still kill me, right?” He rubbed his nose into the crook of Simon’s neck, kissing the mole there and clutching the back of his shirt. “Promise you’ll kill me.”

(I don’t want to live forever.)

Simon kissed him clumsily on the ear. “’Course. But only when we’re a hundred and twenty years old and senile as the old codger downstairs. We can have our final battle then, and go out with a fiery bang in our dressing gowns and slippers.”

Baz wasn’t satisfied.  He shook his head, and then shook all over. Simon gripped him tighter, pressing Baz between his own body and the wall, holding him there with his weight, as if he could physically keep him from falling apart.

It was a terrifying thought, in the cold light of reality. One of them being alive without the other. What that would mean. How they would have to live.

It made Simon sick and panicky to think about it, so he just didn’t. But maybe it wasn’t that easy for Baz. They still didn’t know how immortal was immortal. Whether Baz would keep aging like a human, or whether he would die naturally. Nicodemus never even hinted at answers, to the point where Penny was convinced he didn’t actually know himself.

But even if that was the case, immortality didn’t mean completely immortal. There were still _options_.

Simon ran a hand through Baz’s hair and gripped the back of his neck firmly. “I thought you were going to turn me into a vampire and make me stay with you forever.”

Baz was still shaking. “If that doesn’t happen, if you die first, if you just _die_ , I . . .”

(I always thought I’d die first. And hoped you would be the one to kill me.)

“But that’s easy,” Simon said, pulling back just enough to push his face against Baz’s, too hard to be called a nuzzle. There were unshed tears glinting defiantly in Baz’s grey eyes, gone black and blue with pain. “Viking funeral, remember?”

Baz looked at him blankly. Simon smiled and knocked their foreheads together. “You know what that is, Baz? It’s a flaming pyre set adrift on the sea.”

“And what, I should just throw myself into the blaze and go out that way? I thought you wanted to keep me from killing myself.”

“I thought you didn’t have death wish,” Simon countered. “And I’m not okay with you dying. Or killing yourself. But I’d hardly be able to stop you, would I? And the afterlife would be incredibly boring without you.”

“I hardly think we’re going to the same place, Snow. And you wouldn’t be able to stop me from setting myself on fire in lots of _other_ creative ways, either. Or setting everyone else on fire and laughing as I watch them burn. Actually, there are quite a lot of things I could do if you weren’t there to be the hero . . .”

“That’s why I’m hoping you go for the pyre. And what do you mean we aren’t going to the same place?”

“I don’t think there’s a circle in the _inferno_ for moronically oblivious Chosen Ones.”

“Sod off. I’ll die of boredom before I make it to St. Peter’s gates.”

“Heaven would be like a kind of eternal ennui, wouldn’t it?” Baz mused. He lifted one of his arms draped around Simon’s shoulders to tug idly at a golden brown curl. “The monotony would no doubt become exceptionally tedious. No matter, we’ll work something out. Negotiate with the devil or something.” There was a smile twitching in the corner of his mouth.

Simon cupped his jaw and kissed him.

When they finally broke apart, Baz stretched his arms above his head and wandered back to his violin. Simon recognized the Kishi Bashi song he started playing. It was the song he always played for Simon.

_When in doubt you made me stay connected in with the beyond and on, like when the radio plays on and on and on and on and on . . . So the earth will dry of song, if I sang you one, carry on! Carry on, Phenomenon! So you got the best of me, so amazingly, carry on! Carry on, Phenomenon! And on and on and on and on . . ._

.

.

Simon didn’t let Baz go back to his aunt’s that night.

In bed, Simon curled into his sleeping knot around Baz, locking their arms and legs together, winding his tail around Baz’s torso and wrapping his wings around them both, enveloping them. Baz fell asleep almost immediately, but Simon lay awake with his forehead pressed against the dip between Baz’s shoulders, trying to understand.

It wasn’t that Baz _wanted_ to die, it was that he would _rather_ die, and he felt the need to prove that fact. He wasn’t depressed, or suicidal, or bipolar, or any kind of mental instability you could label or medicate; he was just plain mad.

Simon wondered if it was the kind of unavoidable madness that came with being rich, brilliant, evil, and high-functioning all at once. The kind of mad that made you manipulate people by flirting, and flirt by sending Chimeras and pushing people down the stairs. That meant you were constantly at war with your own nature, fighting bloodlust.

Baz loved fire. He liked setting things on fire. He liked almost setting himself on fire. He liked reminding himself that he could still die.

It was all right. It happened. Simon would come home to find Baz on a smoking jag, or tossing a fireball between his hands, or twisting it around his fingers like a poisonous snake.

Baz was just so . . . capricious. Simon was a longtime scholar of the mercurial moods of Tyrannus Basilton Grimm-Pitch, and even having recently learned there were more than pissed off, sadistically amused, plotting, and disgusted, he still could not for the life of him predict what Baz was going to choose to care about day to day.

Simon clutched Baz closer and crushed his nose against the back of his head. Tucking himself into crook of his neck. Lining up their very bones. It felt good. It always felt so good. They wouldn’t be able to do this if one of them died. He supposed that was why kissing Baz always worked. It was like the fire, a reminder. Remember what you have to lose. Remember why you don’t want to do this.

Maybe they just needed to keep reminding each other.

.

.

.

** Things we need to work on: **

**No. 1 – Baz’s madness.** (It doesn’t come up often, but when it does . . .)

**No. 2 – Finding a good fireproofing spell.**

**No. 3 – Doing things that feel good.** (Like flying.)

 **No. 4 – Not stressing too much about school work.** (Or falling so deep into useless academia and obsessing over proving that your professors are idiots that you forget to eat, sleep, and answer your phone – _Baz_.)

 **No. 5 – Not distressing the neighbors.** (Baz denies ever talking to them, but they look at him like he flashed them his fangs. They don’t even bother trying to get a decent greeting out of Penny.)

**No. 6 – Talking.**

**No. 7 – Thinking.**

**No. 8 – Goals for therapy.** (Like getting to a point where I don’t _need_ weekly sessions.) 

**No. 9 – New lists.**

**No. 10 – Carry on.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's a wrap! Kinda. I will post the EMDR thing, eventually, but with my track record you never know when that might be. Good news is, I'm almost completely finished with the second part of the series, and it's gonna have Fiona and Nicodemus and fire, so that'll be fun.


End file.
